200th Post!

Wow. I started this blog one 4AM out of sheer boredom - then, after about 2 months of sporadic posting, starting to really enjoy it. Now, I'm at 200 posts - and thousands of hits. I hope y'all are enjoying reading it as I am writing it - Chag Sameach [Happy Festival] to all, and wish us a safe flight to the City of Angels in just a few hours!

Joining SerandEz in the future is S.I.L. - my sister-in-law, Layah. Welcome, Layah! Her posts will more often deal with life, life issues, happiness, spirituality, and what we can learn, leaving me with all the stuff that doesn't really matter. Nice. :)

As a quick note on Sukkos, whose schedule many other bloggers have been complaining about...

We flew in Monday morning from New York to my parents' house in Cleveland. I did not go to sleep Sunday night, as we had to pack up for two very different climates and ten days, and I had much to take care of at home. I managed to get about an hour of sleep on the flight, and we got a ride from Akron to Beachwood, where my dad picked us up.

I was immediately dispatched to get all the bamboo poles from the back of the garage, buried under some blankets and a plank on top of a ledge you need a ladder for. I then had to carry all of them to the sukkah, put them through some windows, come all the way around, and put them all up - no simple feat. You have to lift each pole up through the window, through the roof of the porch (which the fiberglass roof cranks up and rests against the side of the house), and balance it on the beams - but there's a wall on one side, and a raised siding on the other, so you have to put each pole all the way through on a slant, then straighten it. It also requires making sure you switch off thin and thick ends of the poles. Once most of the roof is covered, this is almost impossible, as you can't stick your head through, and can't see what you're doing.

After finishing the schach, I had to do the decorations - of course, the posters are just too small to fit well on the wall beams, so that took maneuvering, and after putting up all the chains and placing all the fruits nicely on the far end on a ledge (so pretty...!), I was finished. As often happens in Cleveland, it started to rain 20 minutes before Sukkos started. My father decided to crank down the roof over the schach to keep the sukkah dry, as we usually do. All of a sudden... SNAP! CRASH!!!

The cable that lets the roof go up and down snapped, and the roof crashed down right on the sukkah. The fruits went flying, which my 3-year old nephew found hilarious, and my father was devestated. A sukkah with a roof is not much of a sukkah. We ate in a different neighbor's sukkah each meal (and turned down many other kind offers), and had a wonderful Yom Tov - and I didn't realize until today that all my work was for naught. Hmph. That's what I get for complaining, I guess...

Chag Sameach! Ironic - "The Merciful One will re-establish for us the Sukkah of David which fell." My father's name is David. This kind of thing seems to happen every year...